Cross My Heart
by AmaliaRose
Summary: "Cross my heart and hope to die."


_I'll see you in the future when we're older_  
_And we are full of stories to be told._  
_Cross my heart and hope to die,_  
_I'll see you with your laughter lines._

**xLaughter Lines-Bastille**

* * *

There was a time that Prussia never talked about; it was a time that no one else knew. A time that no one else would ever know, but for the only other that experienced it. It wasn't a mistake, and it wasn't shameful or anything that had any reason to be hidden, but nobody knew regardless.

With all the bloodshed and all the wrong doings that the ex-nation had initiated, it was the last thing that should have been a secret. But Prussia wasn't a warm nation. He was never affectionate in the way that the Italies were, or the way Spain was.

All his years making mayhem with Spain and France had made him long for something he was never made for. A country born of hatred and a longing for power-a militant country-was all he was ever supposed to be. But Spain and France... Spain and France showed him things he wasn't ever meant to have. Love, passion, kindness. Prussia longed for them. He wanted to feel that warm thing unfurl in his own chest, to feel something that made the spring breeze blow and the hot sun shine.

Prussia wasn't an affectionate nation, but he wanted to be, and he told France as much. Of course the country of love would understand, would light up with sympathy and promise things that he couldn't make true. He called it, "La douleur exquise."

When Prussia kissed France for the first time, it felt right.

He didn't feel that warmth that comes from kissing someone that you're in love with-he and France weren't in love; he felt a comfort rush over him-a momentarily calmness and quieting of the war ever waging in his head. So began their short affair, if it could be called that.

It was never sexual. Always chaste kisses, sometimes lingering and holding hands under the abendrot sky. The sillage of France's cologne was ever present in the Prussian country's mind; the warm days listening to the psithurism echoing the forests they walked through lit a place in his chest. He wished for it to last forever. France would whisper to him, "We'll always meet again."

It all came to end end in 1914, at the start of the Great War. Prussia's head was overtaken with violence and madness that he couldn't bring hiself to climb out of; France was too busy fending for Europe against Germany. The Prussian often thought of France, locked up in his room, in the fleeting moments of peace. He told himself that it would all end soon, that this would be over and he could be fixed again.

The end didn't come. With World War II, France fell and Prussia was more alone than ever, carrying out orders that tore him from the inside out. Nights were the worst, dreaming of France's demise, that gleaming red symbol, the colour of Prussia's own eyes, cut into the ancient nation's back as a warning, a message, a victory. Sometimes he dreamed of the forest, and the smell of France, and he would wake, the saudade feelings eating him from the inside out.

And then, it really was over. Prussia did meet France again, but the nation could not look him in the eyes. Not after all the hurt and loss he'd caused him. The feelings of vermod crashed around him, sounding like gunshots in his head. He was put in a cell for a long, long time, longing for the feeling of the sun on his pale skin. Longing for the briefest of touches from France, from Spain.

On the day Prussia died, France cried on Spain's shoulder.

On the day he was buried, the remaining nation rested his head against the cold of the gravestone. Snow was beginning to fall and the air was cool and crisp.

"I'll see you again. I promised you that. I promised you I'd see you again. You saw me, but I never looked at you. I never met you again. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

There's a tragedy in missed opportunity. There's a sadness in old friends, a sense of melancholy in old places and old memories. Like the scent of old books, or a warm breeze on a summer night that makes you feel just a little homesick for a person rather than a place.

Prussia never talked about that time. He never mentioned it to anyone, because it was his. Private and itimate, France thought he'd died longing for something that he was never made for; what Prussia died thinking though, was that maybe, maybe he hadn't needed to long quite so much, because it was France's face he saw in his last moments.

That was enough for him.

* * *

_La douleur exquise_: (n.)The exquisite pain of wanting the affection of someone you know you can never have.

_Abendrot_: (n.)The colour of the sky while the sun is setting.

_Sillage_: (n.)The trace of someone's perfume; the scent that lingers in the air after something or someone has been there before you and gone.

_Psithurism_: (n.)The sound of the leaves rustling as the wind blows through the trees.

_Saudade_: (n.)A deep, nostalgic, and melancholic longing for something or someone, often accompanied with a denied fact that what one longs for will never come back.

_Vemod_: (n.)A tender sadness or pensive melancholy; the calm feeling that something emotionally significant is over and never will be back.


End file.
